Monthly Archives: February 2013

Today would have been the fifty-first birthday of Dwayne McDuffie, a colleague and friend I admired a great deal. Tomorrow will be two years since his death. Dwayne was among other things the creator of Static, a superhero I consider to be the best since Spider-Man. (Though I’ve been known to boast that Blue Devil, by Gary Cohn, Paris Cullins and me, deserves that honor, Dwayne knew what I really thought.)

Dwayne was also a man who knew his own mind, sure of what he stood for and what he’d stand up for. That he found a way to turn out terrific superhero adventure stories that appealed to young people at a time when the comic book superhero had largely become the province of much older fans (though he wrote for that older audience too) was something I considered a small miracle.

Dwayne’s work at DC and Marvel, his co-founding of Milestone Media, and his successes at Cartoon Network are well-known. What I want to do here is take a moment to remember his kindness.

One year at Comic-Con in San Diego, Dwayne and I were talking and walking past the tables of small, independent comics creators, stopping now and then to see what new and unknown work was bubbling up from new and unknown artists and writers.

Like anyone, when I see a comic that looks worth reading, I’ll grab the book, reach for my wallet and ask how much it costs; but when someone knows my name and my work, they’ll sometimes tell me just to take it, no charge, perhaps describing it as a fair exchange for the reading pleasure I’ve provided them. Knowing that the marginal cost of a comic book is surely not the cover price, and that the profit from one sale was not going to make or break their weekend, what I normally did was accept the gift with thanks and move on.

On this occasion, luckily for me, it was Dwayne who found something that intrigued him first, and when he reached for his wallet, he got the same offer I was used to, and likely deserved it more. But he responded in a way I never had. “No, man,” he said, “you worked hard on this. How much is it?” He made them take the money, and he made them feel good about making comics. And since I don’t believe he counted mindreading among his many talents, he missed my acute but thankfully internal embarrassment.

Needless to say, I don’t take free comics from young creators anymore. They’ve worked hard on those books.

I’m always happy to see non-comics news media cover comics in a serious and thoughtful way, so I was pleased to find this article on The New Republic’s website last week. The writer, Glen Weldon (whose Superman: The Unauthorized Biography I’m definitely looking forward to reading) does a good job of bringing to a general audience a story about how some classic superhero comics got made. Which is also the story of how great companies and characters rose and fell, and how the creators of those characters got consistently shafted to one degree or another.

The concern I have with telling this story in a brief overview like Weldon’s is that it can tend to be as reductionist as the “official history” it aims to refute. And I worry the pendulum has swung from an accepted wisdom that says Stan Lee created everything to one that says he created nothing.

That Lee made himself the face of Marvel (for ego-boosting reasons or smart business ones, or both) is undeniable, as is the fact that Jack Kirby in turn felt undervalued. And when Kirby later asserted his creative importance by saying things like “I wrote those stories,” that was undeniably true in some very important ways.

But the Lee and Kirby stories read very differently from the Kirby solo or Kirby-and-anyone-else stories. And that was because of Lee’s words, preposterously showy and high-octane as they were; what made Marvel Marvel was the synthesis of what each man brought. As a kid I was more attracted to the comparatively staid DC books, and was even a little put off by the Lee brand of constant showmanship. But when Weldon says that “what made readers rabid for Marvel’s ham-fisted stories had less to do with how they were told, and much more to do with how they were sold,” I think he goes too far: at least in the early days of the “Marvel age of comics,” the selling and the telling were pretty inseparable.

So who did “write that,” and what is comic book writing anyway? (I should say at this point that I don’t have a personal stake in the answer to the first question: the extent of my acquaintance with those involved is that I’ve been introduced to Stan Lee a couple of times at conventions, and got seated next to Jack Kirby at a dinner once; I also had my first story at DC Comics drawn by Steve Ditko, and worked with Don Heck for a couple of years on Wonder Woman, though our communication was mostly through an editor). My experience tells me that while it’s true, as Weldon says, that Lee’s definition of “writing” wouldn’t line up with the average person’s expectations, the average person doesn’t understand how any comics are written, and certainly not that there are many ways to write them.

One thing I can say for sure about making comics is that anyone who wasn’t involved in a particular comic’s creation has no idea who contributed what; in fact, it doesn’t take long before even the people who did create the comic can’t sort it out anymore.

One reason for that is an aspect of the business of comics that Weldon doesn’t touch on: not marketing, but publishing schedules. Relentless monthly deadlines, especially when scrupulously attended to as they were in the sixties, mean an endless churn of pages and, if you’re producing a lot of work (or trying to), a lot of anxiety. There’s really a lot less time to think about how you’re going to do it, or what your master plan should be, or even how you’re going to sell it (if, like Lee, you’re wearing both the writer and the editor hat); it’s mostly about getting the damn work out!

And if some of it seems to succeed, and to strike a chord, then wow–give yourself a quick pat on the back before looking at your calendar to see when the next plot or dialogue job is due; or sitting down with the very exciting pages an artist has turned in based on a brief story conference and trying to figure out how they fit with what went before and what the characters might be saying in such a situation, while appearing to grow and change (without actually doing so, because your readers really want the characters to remain the same month after month).

“Plot-style” comics writing starts to look like a kind of salvation. And the truth is that comics stories can originate in all sorts of ways and then come together almost miraculously.

Yes, it’s hard to believe all of Stan Lee’s stories about the beginnings of Marvel Comics. My guess is that in many cases he doesn’t even know anymore if they’re true. Which is not meant as a slam. He’s a storyteller, and he’ll tell the story that seems to work in the moment–which may just mean that he’s never stopped writing, however you want to define the term.

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One additional note on the Lee/Kirby relationship: I highly recommend Michael Chabon’s short story “Citizen Conn,” published last year in The New Yorker (Feb. 13, 2012). It certainly doesn’t represent the “true story,” but it richly imagines what might be at the core of such a partnership. And it’s anything but reductionist.

I heard the latest news about Amethyst, that the current DC Comics series she’s been starring in has been canceled, on Facebook. That’s where I always hear that a character I had a hand in creating will be showing up in a new comic or cartoon or as a toy or what have you. Which is not to say that DC has made a special point of keeping me out of the loop; there’s a long tradition of comic book publishers pretty much ignoring the artists and writers who invented their characters when those people are no longer doing work for them. And I’ve got it a lot better than many of my predecessors who created far more well-known heroes than Amethyst or Blue Devil: I have a contract with DC that specifies the royalties I’ll receive when my work is reprinted, adapted or licensed, and DC always pays.

But that doesn’t mean it’s easy to see my characters (not that they’re “mine” in any legal sense) used in a way that seems to fundamentally misunderstand them. Or sometimes to understand them but decide to change them anyway, as appears to be the case with the recent Amethyst series: DC recognized they had a character who could be altered to appeal to the “Hunger Games” audience, and so they took a story about a thirteen-year-old girl with a loving family but a hidden and wondrous and dangerous heritage, and made it about a seventeen-year-old who’s been living a desperate and unhappy life on the run before she discovers those older dangers. (I couldn’t say whether the “wondrous” part can be found in this version, since I’m only going by what I’ve read about the series, not having bought the comics myself).

It’s an understandable approach on DC’s part, adapting what they already own for today’s market, even if it didn’t make me happy. But making me happy is actually not in the contract I signed with them.

In any case, the poster on Facebook who called my attention to the cancelation of the Amethyst comic was happy to see it go, and figured I must be too. Well, yes and no. On the one hand, it definitely didn’t represent the Amethyst I’d like the public to know; but on the other, it’s never a good thing to have your work canceled and the impression left that it’s not marketable. Thankfully, I’m not looking for employment in the world of DC and Marvel heroes these days, so I don’t have much concern that those companies will take away a lasting impression that my stuff doesn’t sell. In the big picture, in fact, it’s their stuff that doesn’t sell…not like it did in the 80s and 90s when the bulk of my work for DC (and some for Marvel and Malibu and others) was done. The “public” that knows the latest comics incarnation of Amethyst is a pretty small one, far smaller than the number of people who’ve seen the charming minute-long animated shorts now appearing on Cartoon Network (which definitely “gets” the original comic book series, though it necessarily skimps on a lot of the detail and nuance).

And I do feel bad for Christy Marx and Aaron Lopresti, the talented writer and artist who poured a lot of themselves into the current series and who I hope will find immediate work to replace it. Better yet, somebody should pay them both to work on projects of their own creation. That’s not the way the monthly comic book industry works, I know–Gary Cohn and I were hugely fortunate to have come into the business at a time when publishers, DC especially, were excited about trying new things–but I’d like to believe such a moment could come around again.